Picture
this: a woman named Eleanor finds herself in a waiting room and is called into
an office. A kindly man informs her that she has died and proceeds to thank her
for all the good deeds she did on earth, deeds that earned her enough points to
qualify for the Good Place.

Ted Danson and Kristen Bell in The Good Place
(image from sqpn.com)

But
Eleanor knows there has been a terrible bookkeeping error. She did not do any of
these good deeds—that must have been someone else. As a matter of fact, she was
a pretty awful person on earth. She lied and cheated and, worst of all, she cut
herself off from all her meaningful relationships. Eleanor is the only one who knows
that she doesn’t deserve to be in The Good Place. Will she fess up? Or will she
now try to become a good person in order to remain here, and not to be banished
to The Bad Place? And how will her newfound friends, Chidi, Tahani, and Jianyu,
help or hinder her efforts?

The EPIC Fall Retreat -- a "good place" to be

This
is a synopsis of the first episode of the TV show The Good Place, which our college students watched on our fall
retreat last weekend. In two nights we eagerly binge-watched the entire first
season, and it left us with lots of questions about what it means to be a good
person, and what a fair reckoning of our lives might look like.

Today’s
readings are concerned with this sort of reckoning. Zephaniah prophesies
punishment against the wealthy for their complacency, their unbelief, their
abuse of the poor … for their gall in saying, “I have enough money to do what I
want to do, and who’s going to stop me? God Almighty?” For that, says
Zephaniah, the people will lose their money, their homes, and their freedom.
Sure enough, the Babylonians will soon conquer them and cart them off into an
exile which the prophets say is God’s doing, not that of the Babylonians. It’s the
deserved punishment for being awful people. And naturally, since the ancient
Jews had no developed concept of an afterlife, this punishment is to take place
while the people are still living.

Our
psalm today counters Zephaniah’s bleak vision with an appeal to trust. Even in
death, we belong to God. Yet the psalmist is also concerned with how we spend
this little bit of time we have. “So teach us to number our days,” he implores,
“that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” The psalmist relies on God to rescue
us from our sinful ways. But both Zephaniah and the psalmist are in the
business of bookkeeping: minding the store of our day-to-day decisions so that
we can demonstrate ourselves faithful to God, our creator.

What
shape are your books in? Do you do your own books? Do you keep score for
yourself? I numbered my days this week. As of today, I have been alive for
16,462 days. Not bad! That’s 23 million minutes. That’s a billion and a half
seconds. Now, even assuming I don’t die particularly young, I’m probably past
the midpoint of my life. I’ll shoot for 30,000 days—that’s two and a half billion
seconds. That’s 82 years. That’s a good number. It’ll be enough for me.

But
does this number-crunching help me apply my heart to wisdom? Will the
inevitability of my death inspire me to grow? No matter what we do or don’t do
in this life, it’ll all be over before we know it. What then? Will we be
welcomed into The Good Place? And on what basis? What will the Great Bookkeeper
say?

In
Jesus’ parable today, a man goes on a journey. Let’s assume that this is God, and
let’s identify ourselves—the entire human race—as the master’s slaves. God goes
away somewhere—becomes apparently absent—and entrusts us with his liquid assets.
Now, the word “talent,” meaning a specific sum of money, does sound like our
word for the God-given talents we use to accomplish things. But don’t get
wrapped up in this coincidence or you’ll only wind up comparing your own
talents to those of others. The parable is not
literally about money, but let money be the metaphor for now. Money is the
stuff of bookkeeping. It can be numbered precisely and invested wisely, and it
can accrue interest in a healthy economy. Whether it stands in for time or
abilities or opportunities to love, for the sake of the story, the point is
that my money’s as good as yours.

Next,
understand this: one talent is a lot
of money—by today’s standards, maybe half a million dollars. So the master goes
away and entrusts one slave with two and a half million, another with one
million, and a third with half a million. This guy is loaded. Not only that, he’s
trusting. He gives us his belongings and doesn’t micromanage—or even manage—what
we do with it. Sounds like life to me! In short, God treats us not as slaves,
but as partners-in-training, awarding vast sums even to the one he doesn’t
trust all that much. And then, after a long time, he returns.

How
does God return to us? Zephaniah has just told us that God will make “a
terrible end … of all the inhabitants of the earth.” Now, if you love to talk
about “the end times,” OK, that’s fine, but it’s unnecessary. First, there’s no
point postulating about things that both Jesus and Paul have specifically said are
beyond our ability to know or understand. Second, even if the world does
suddenly end on some idle Tuesday in a slam-bang, divinely dramatic way, would
you really want to be around to see it?

So
today, I want us to think of “the day of the Lord” simply as the day of each of
our individual deaths. At least we can all agree that this will happen. In
death, we step off the timeline into the settling of accounts.

The
first two business partners please the master greatly: they have doubled what
was given to them. Perhaps they became job creators, or they provided capital
for some exciting new business. Or maybe they just gave it all away and became
so well loved for their generosity that people gave back to them what they
needed and more. I don’t know. The point is that they did something with it.

But
the third partner hid his half million under his mattress for the rest of his
life. He was too afraid of losing the money to play the game. His fear of God
is not respectful awe, but abject, cowering fear—not like a partner, but like a
slave. For him, the fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom, but of folly.

The
slave makes excuses: he claims that the master is well known for taking things
that don’t belong to him. Is this true? We don’t have to muse for very long to discover
that it is not possible for God to act in this way, since all things in all
space and time belong to God. Though we may feel put upon by God’s sovereignty,
there is nothing inappropriate about it. It’s just the way it is.

The
slave believes he has gamed the system, checking off the boxes of commandments
he has not broken, steadfastly avoiding due punishment. But it turns out that the
master was never worried about the money. The money is not the end, but the
means through which mere slaves become beloved partners. When the master says
“well done” to the first two, it’s not because they doubled his money, but
because they worked at becoming. They
played the game, win or lose. The sin of the third slave is that he put more
value in the money than in the assignment. Neither money nor time nor even our good
works have any value after we die. But who have we become? Have we learned how to love? There is enough love for
everyone, and it never runs out.

Point values in The Good Place(screen shot from Episode 1)

Sure,
I imagine that God is omniscient and sees all that we do. But there are no
point totals, because that would be futile. If we did good works to score
points—to earn our way into God’s good graces—our motives would taint them. And
so our good works, even if they earn a “well done!” from the master, are just that:
good works. They are valuable for their own sake. But they are not the currency
over which our accounts will be settled. In death, God deletes all our files
and welcomes only us.

The
third slave doesn’t see that. He believes he is nothing without his spotless
record book. He can’t imagine having any sort of relationship with the master, who is only frightening to him. Who
knows how much time he spent all his life weeping and gnashing his teeth in an
effort not to risk, not to engage with God’s world in any way? It would have
felt like death, putting ink on those pages—trying hard and perhaps failing, giving
to others without expectation of anything in return. It’s too late now, and all
is lost.

Or
is it? No! The shocker is that in death, everything that dies is resurrected! All
the third slave needs to do is throw his record book away and die, and the
master will raise him up as a resurrected partner! But those who refuse to die cannot
enter into love—the joy of the master—the Good Place.

Sin
is willful separation from God, separation from love. To those who hide from death
and thus from God, love is painful and fear becomes a semi-comfortable refuge, a
Good-Enough Place. Maybe the Bad Place is just a holding tank for all the party
poopers who just need to get over their fear of death. Of course, that process
would feel like punishment. But it may be more like a surgical procedure:
separating the wheat from the chaff, the fear from the love, then nursing the
formerly fearful back into health and a resurrected life.

Fear
not. You are eternally loved. God knows we screw things up in our lives. But you
really can’t screw this up permanently—except by saying, “I am not a part of
God’s world. I don’t need to play.” Don’t kid yourself. All of creation is The
Good Place, even your life right now. To those who love, death is just another
doorway into an even larger Good Place.

I
trust the business sense of the master who cares nothing for money. I trust the
hands of the surgeon who is operating on me. And I trust the love of the one
who took all our deaths into his own on the cross. I trust the one who went ahead
of us into death and came back just long enough to say, “Don’t be afraid. I’ll go
on ahead and meet you there.” Amen.

This sermon began life as a seminary paper. That work, which is more academic in nature, can be found here.

Let
us imagine for a moment that we are residents of ancient Judah. The setting is
Jerusalem in the year 723 B.C.E. Fear is in the air, for the Assyrians are
threatening to overrun both the northern kingdom of Israel, against which we
hold no small grudge, and the southern kingdom of Judah, where we live and
where we believe—or at least hope—that our identity as the keepers of God’s
temple will protect us from foreign invasion.

Isaiah on the street corner?(from https://static.pexels.com/photos/363156/pexels-photo-363156.jpeg)

People
bustle by, taking care of business and trying not to think about the dire political
situation. A beggar cries out for bread, but he is ignored. A thin-faced widow
leads her four children through an alley, on her way who-cares-where. And on
the busiest street corner of all, the Prophet Isaiah has begun to sing a song.

From
its first notes, we recognize it as a familiar and rather hackneyed song about
a vineyard. This is surprising fare from a prophet who has gained a reputation
for gloom and doom. But the song is a guilty pleasure, and Isaiah is a good
singer, so we stop to listen.

The
first lyrics we indeed know well, for we have heard them sung often at weddings
by a paid musician or a musically inclined uncle.[1] We can even sing along
with verse 1: “I will sing now for my dear friend a song about him and his
vineyard. My dear friend has a vineyard on a fertile hill.”[2] The lyrics are pleasant to
the ear in our native Hebrew, with a singsong quality:

When
we hear “lididi” and “dodi,” it may as well be “do wah diddy diddy” to us … but
these are not nonsense syllables. Both words mean “dear one” or “beloved.” The
man is setting up a house for his bride, and as the music modulates, we expect
to hear about a couple of kids running in the yard. So, imagine instead the
Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

“And
he expected a yield of grapes … but it yielded nasty, stinking grapes.” Whoa,
whoa, hang on. This isn’t a love song at all: it’s a cheating song! What began
as “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” has become “I Heard It through the Grapevine.”

We
move into the second section of what will turn out to be a suite, and it is
here that Isaiah changes rhythm and even vocal tone to signify that it is no longer
the best man who is speaking. The honeymoon is over, and the bridegroom
himself, all worked up in grief and anger, steps up to the microphone for his
recitative: “And now, residents of Jerusalem … judge, if you please, between me
and my vineyard.” Isaiah has dragged us into court, and we are placed on the
bench to hear the farmer’s grievances: “What more could I have done for my
vineyard that I have not already done? Why, when I expected a yield of grapes,
did it yield nasty, stinking grapes?”

Now,
suddenly conscripted into service as magistrates, we wonder: how can a vineyard
be responsible for its own crop? Could the farmer have done more after all? Did
he do something to make his bride feel unloved? Or is this mixed metaphor about
to break down completely? We are given no time to review the evidence before a
loud voice proclaims the sentence:

So now, listen up! I will declare to you what I am
doing to my vineyard. I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed. I
will break down its wall, and it will become a trampled-down place. And I will
lay it waste. It will not be pruned, and it will not be hoed, and thorn bushes
and other rough growth will come up …

The
court has become a divorce court, and this relationship seems to be over. We
move from the soulful heartbreak of “I Heard It through the Grapevine” into a
bitter breakup song, a country song, perhaps “My Give a Damn’s Busted.” The
farmer is leaving his bride, and he will allow the vineyard to go to seed in
whatever way nature takes its course. “… And I will command the dark clouds not
to rain on it!” Here is yet another surprise. This is no literal farmer and no literal
husband. Only God can control the weather.

8th century B.C.E., after the Kingdom of Israel
had split in two. Note the menacing
Assyrians to the north!

When
we first noticed Isaiah on the street corner, we expected a prophecy of doom,
and we’re going to get one. Oh boy! I bet it’s about that accursed northern
kingdom of Israel, the faithless ones who worship on a mountain instead of in
the temple, and who are about to get served by the Assyrians. Surely this
prophecy will be against them, we hope, as Isaiah continues: “And the vineyard
of YHWH-of-the-angel-armies is the house of Israel.” Of course it is. We knew
it all along, so we exchange self-satisfied smirks.

“And
the man of Judah is the plantation of his delight.”

With
this line, Isaiah cuts us to the bone. There we stand on the corner, tried and
convicted, though we don’t even understand yet what the charges are. All this
time Isaiah has been using God’s voice to condemn us! This is not a love song, or a cheating song, or a breakup song,
or even a “God Bless Judah” patriotic anthem. This is a condemnation of us for blatant sins against God and
humanity.

But
what have we done to deserve this condemnation? Isaiah saves the charges for
the very end, and here he uses one of the most famous examples of wordplay in
the Hebrew Bible: “And [God] expected mishpat—justice—but
behold, mishpah—bloodshed! ‘Tz’daqa’—righteousness—but behold, ‘tz’aqa’—a cry of distress!” The words
stick in our ears as they stick in Isaiah’s throat. We have cheated on God. We
have produced stinking grapes, rather than the sweet grapes that God took every
possible measure to assure and which we had no right not to produce. God loves us and longs for us, but what have we
done? We stand guilty as charged … right there on the street corner in
Jerusalem, surrounded by beggars, widows, and orphans.

Is
all hope lost? No. For as we prayed in today’s Collect, God is always readier to
hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve. The
harvest will come, but not in the way we expected.

Jesus
said, “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard
…” Sound familiar? After three quarters of a millennium, the new prophet Jesus
stands in Jerusalem—right in the reconstructed temple!—developing the song
further. The behavior of the tenants is deplorable. Their logic is
ridiculous—how will killing the heir get them the inheritance? Yet this is what
they do. What treatment do they deserve from the landowner? Death, we cry, of
course!

But
we have seen the enemy, and he is us. We have cheated on God. We have killed
the Lord of Love. We have concentrated our wealth among very few in the name of
“progress.” We have wrecked our planet, and that is affecting the poor first. We
continue to allow all sorts of injustice. We have tried to take God’s Kingdom
by force, when force will accomplish, at best, a sickly parody of what God
desires for us. By our fruits we are known.[3]

Is
all hope lost? No. For we are God’s beloved planting, and God is always ready
to give more than we either desire or deserve. The harvest will come, but not
in a way that anybody could have expected.

Now,
we should probably let go of the husband-and-wife metaphor at this point.
Otherwise we just might wind up thinking of God as an abusive spouse, and overidentify
ourselves with wanton strumpets or some other ridiculous sexist term. Let’s focus
instead on the humility to which the vineyard song calls us. We are God’s
beloved creation, made for the purpose of love. Creation is like a spillover of
divine love into billions and billions of consciousnesses, made in the image of
God—made to love and to create and to give joy. When we fail to do that for
which we were made, we yield stinking grapes.

But
the vintner will see that the good harvest comes. “I am the vine,” says Jesus,
“and you are the branches. Abide in me.” You
are God’s beloved. Do you get
that—really get that? We are invited to be
the harvest, and to live eternally in God together. “Eternally” doesn’t just
mean after we die; it also means right
now.

Now,
I don’t know about your own experience of God’s love, but let me tell you mine:
it was only once I truly understood myself to have yielded stinking grapes that
I felt God at work within me, redeeming my life. Sin-and-redemption is not a
narrative that our culture is comfortable with, but it is a narrative that
defines who I am in relationship to my creator. When I was in the pit, God
jumped down into it with me and held me and called me “beloved.” I didn’t
become a better person through logic or willpower or shame, or in order to get
something from God. I became a better person because I am loved. “We love
because He first loved us.”[4]

And
so we give love to people who need it, not just people who deserve it. We use
the talents that God has given us in joyful ways—not calculated for maximum
efficiency, but with abandon, as labors of love. And we give away our money,
especially in a culture like ours where money has the final say in most
matters. For the sake of our souls, we must
practice not needing as much of it! We seek out the joy in giving away our wealth—not
to meet a budget, but to help support the work that the Holy Spirit is already
engaged in.

As
I look around St. Paul’s, I see good grapes ripening for the harvest. And it’s
not like we are incapable of producing filthy, stinking grapes—after all, this
story is for us, not just some kingdom next door. But God has given us more
than we could ever deserve. If we have lack, it’s not God’s fault. It’s either
because we don’t see the abundance, or because some other human beings are
keeping the abundance from us.

So
let’s be a different kind of human beings, relaxing into God’s generosity.
Let’s share, and in that sharing, let’s grow more closely together in love. For
that, my friends, is God’s dream for this vineyard, and we are the planting of
God’s delight. Amen.

[1] For more about Isaiah 5:1-7 as an “uncle’s song,” see
John T. Willis, “The Genre of Isaiah 5:1-7,” in Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 96, No. 3 (Sep., 1977), 337.